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Just a quick note on one part of Mitt Romney's big speech. He didn't simply dismiss global warming, or reject policies intended to address or mitigate against sea level rise, which is closely tied to global warming. Politicians do those things all the time. It's ill-informed and irresponsible. But Romney took this a step further: he used the very idea of controlling sea level rise as a mere rhetorical device, a laugh line to mock Barack Obama's grandiosity. And he milked it for a few long seconds as the crowd at the Republican National Convention laughed.

"President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family."

I don't buy that this is solely about Obama's alleged hubris. It's a twofer: of course the crowd was laughing at the hubris angle; while I don't have a poll to prove it, it's safe to say most RNC attendees are not too keen on the current consensus on climate science either. So: double rimshot. But this remark is, needless to say, unhelpful. Sea level rise is a genuine problem. The oceans are actually rising as the planet warms up, in part because the volume of water is expanding due to the extra heat, and in part due to the ongoing melting of polar ice. Evidence suggests that for most of the past 3,000 years, sea levels were stable, but that they began rising in the 1950s. Since then, they crept up at an annual rate of 1.7 millimeters per year. Lately, though, sea level rise has apparently been accelerating: This 2010 paper published by Science magazine (paywalled), notes that over the past 20 years, global sea level has risen an average of 3.3 millimeters a year.

This is becoming a severe social and political problem because so many people around the world, and millions of them in the United States (including Romney's Boston headquarters) are located along coastlines. Approximately 10% of the world's population lives at elevations of 10 meters or less above sea level, the Science paper notes, and many of these places suffer from subsidence, erosion, and other problems that hasten their exposure and possible demise.

The biggest risk here is from storms, which can suddenly pump up sea levels by many meters, with little warning. People like living near coastlines, and, in the U.S. and other parts of the developed world, coastal development has surged in recent years. But most assumptions for development and flood protection assume a certain stability that no longer exists. Denying this (as some state and local governments are doing) is crazy: sooner or later, the people living in these places, and the businesses they built there, will pay the price.

So Romney's notion that helping families and protecting communities against sea level rise are somehow diametrically opposed is silly. He knows better.